Charlotte Harris / Kingsley Napley

Charlotte Harris , a solicitor formerly of Mishcon de Reya from which she was ignominiously dismissed in 2015, represented Lou proud ( the dismissed former head of photographs at Phillips auctions) in a high profile civil and criminal action which her client ultimately lost.

Harris’s grossly unethical behaviour warranted three complaints to the Solicitor’s Regulation Authority within a year, an achievement – or so we have been informed by Anthony Jayes LLP – unprecedented in legal history. The complaints filed by the solicitor Anthony Jayes LLP are of ‘unethical behaviour likely to bring into disrepute the legal system which Harris purports to serve’ . At this time two reports to the commission of racial equality have been tendered due to allegations made against her of racial bullying and intimidation of a witness of African origin.

According to Anthony Jayes solicitors LLP, Harris sought to intimidate witnesses by bullying, harassment, intimidation and lies, by threatening to disclose confidential documents ,by playing on her Jewish background to gain the sympathy of both witness and defendant in a civil suit by claiming that she too had been the victim of racial abuse and claiming untruthfully that a witness for the defence had made a formal statement to her in writing implicating the defendant. Correspondence from Anthony Jayes to Harris, recently disclosed and quoted unexpurgated, reveals the following :

‘You should also resist threatening and intimidating my client’s friends and associates as you did in approaching Mr Olad at his workplace and to avoid any suggestion that such behaviour continues I think it would be sensible if you also avoided the venues my client frequents as well and the shop where Mr Olad works, whilst his employment there continues. There are many other alternative venues that would not provoke tensions.

Given that your interest in my client appears to be less than professional, following him in the street, hiding in shop doorways to observe him , phoning him when he was abroad in an attempt to exonerate your client Ms. Proud from the imputation of being a racist by asserting that her insults ( and those contained in her emails and documents are irrefutably racist and revolting in the crudeness and cruelty of the language employed) were jocular in intent and the product of a series of dysfunctional relationships, cynically exploiting your jewish background to gain the defendant’s sympathy and referring to his skin colour several times during that conversation – in sum there is the suspicion that your behaviour is obsessional and racially motivated . On a related matter, I overheard Jeremy Reed and Hazel Chambers – whose behaviour throughout has been as appalling as yours – making what I consider to be racist remarks about my client during the hearing in 2014. Again, that will have it’s own consequences. Chambers’s remarks in particular were shocking in their virulent hatred of my client.

Later that year Harris arranged to meet Mr Jayes in a local cafe to try to resolve the civil dispute. Having hired a private investigator to look into the background of both the defendant and his lawyer she knew that a former female employee of Mr Jayes’s worked in this cafe. She arrived earlier than planned to engage Jayes’s former employee in a conversation, attributing highly offensive comments about the woman’s weight and appearance to Mr Jayes. Those comments were apocryphal, invented by Harris to upset the woman and turn her against Jayes. This led to a third complaint to the SRA by Mr Jayes. Mr Jayes has described Harris as a ‘ loose cannon’ driven by ‘ greed and venality’ and ‘obsessed by her Jewishness’. A lawyer at Hughmans solicitors described her as a ‘ clinical sociopath in dire need of psychiatric help’.

Ms Harris has also been depicted as a misandrist who is willing to commit gross breaches of the law to achieve her desired ends. It has been alleged that she exploits her Jewish faith as a means to manipulate the unwary to make unguarded confessions and to gain sympathy for her ‘ victimhood’ as a Jew and by so doing she insults not only the legal system of which she is a servant but also the millions of Jews –’ history’s ultimate pariahs’ – who genuinely suffered persecution. It was said by her former mentor at Schillings solicitors – a man who made unflattering references to her being the ‘ office bicycle’, that ‘ she is no stranger to the casting couch ‘, that ‘she possesses a mediocre intellect , is lower middle class with social aspirations beyond her reach who sees the law as an ‘adjunct to show business’ ; and most damningly that her personality combines two acknowledged pathologies : Jewish self loathing and Jewish exceptionalism. Two apparently inimical positions uneasily reconciled in her person’ .

We have recently learned that a Ms Lucy Hughes of Interloper films has approached Harris for an interview about the issues of race and class that permeated this action for a documentary that is in pre production in the US.